Notify users about the status of a feature they've requested

For years, product managers have struggled to close the loop by updating users about the features they've requested.

It's not that it was impossible to do, but the complexity of manually keeping track of who needs what (and each feature's status) in spreadsheets, JIRA, Zendesk, Intercom, or Salesforce was cost prohibitive.

And yet, there's nothing like being able to send a customer a personalized message about a feature you've just shipped and how it will solve a need they have! 💌

Export emails of all who've requested a feature

In productboard, you can now easily retrieve the emails of all users associated with a feature.

Users may either be associated with a feature if an insight of theirs was highlighted and linked to that feature, or if you've manually scored that feature's importance to the user using People columns. Either way, you'll see all such users in a feature's details under Insights.

Notify users by email

By dropping these emails into your email client or marketing automation tool of choice, you can send out an update on the feature's progress. (Don't forget to ask for feedback to inform future iterations and enhancements!)

You may also decide to notify users at other points in time:

When a feature they care about is planned

When you're seeking a better understanding of the underlying need behind some feature request they've sent you ("problem interviews")

When you're seeking to ensure you've designed the ideal solution to users' problems by sharing a prototype or beta version of a feature ("solution interviews")

When you begin working on a feature and would like to heighten anticipation of its imminent launch

To get started notifying users, just look for the Export email icon under Insights in each feature's details pane:

Notifying users via Intercom

Do you use Intercom to send in-app or email communications to customers?

Follow the steps below to quickly tag (in Intercom) all users who requested a certain feature. Then use audience logic to target those users in a manual message.

Steps

In productboard, export the emails of all who've requested a given feature (see above).

In the CSV export, add a new Tag column.

Apply the name of a tag as the value for all rows beneath this column. (e.g. requested-advanced-filtering)

Import your modified CSV: Help Intercom identify the column that represents each user's email. This is the unique identifier Intercom uses to identify that these are existing Intercom users whose records should be updated. Make sure Intercom includes your Tag column in the import. The other fields in the CSV can be ignored for now.

Complete the import, create a new Intercom message and update the audience logic to include all tagged users. (Note: depending on the number of users you're "importing", it may take several minutes for all their records to be updated in Intercom.)